The garden looks so much better with my brushwood fence. The picture was taken from the path leading into the garden.

The old wooden fence that sectioned off the warmest part of the kitchen garden started looking really worse for wear last winter. The wind has been blowing hard on the boards and it was time to replace the fence with something new. My children and I took it down in spring. The original idea was to put up a similar, but slightly lower fence in the same spot.

The only problem with that idea is of course that we would need to replace that fence too in just a few years. So, I tried thinking of something else.

This type of fence really fits the garden. You could camouflage the fence posts or cut them to a fitting height after a while.

My brushwood fence

I had been dreaming about getting one of those simple brushwood fences that create a type of natural-looking barrier in your garden. A combination of compost pile and fence, that is. The first time I saw one of these fences was at my friends Birgar and Maria's place. My friends Friederike and Sven did something similar in their kitchen garden, and it just looks so lovely! Unfortunately, I didn't have enough brushwood in my own garden to get started right away.

Read more about growing in compost here: Growing vegetables in compost

But then one day, I went to visit Gunnar in the neighboring village. He had a kind of brushwood fence in his garden, made with weeds too. Like a large wall, almost. This is exactly what I needed to see. There were all kinds of twigs and weeds in there. Everything from old raspberry bushes to Jerusalem artichoke stems and much more. Not only twigs from trees, that is. I didn't know you could do it like that! That's when I decided.

Quick to build

Unfortunately, our friend who works at the sawmill had just destroyed a bunch of boards that we might have been able to use for our fence posts. Instead, we decided to go for regular impregnated posts, around 2.3 inches in diameter. After we posted our progress on Instagram and Facebook, a man from the village actually came to drop of a whole trailer filled with old brushwood that we could use. Wonderful!

We gave our oldest kids a few coins to help me and my husband Philip with the posts. We placed them around 3.4 feet (1 meters) apart, and the second row were placed half that distance apart.

The brushwood is not that tightly packed right now, the layers are quite airy really. I'm guessing that it will start to compress the more brushwood I use.

Even the weeds look great with the brushwood fence as a backdrop. The fence blocks the view of our parked cars too.

Easy to build

The kitchen garden got a completely new look when we built the fence. It just looks so nice! And it didn't even take that long to make, no more than an hour when the whole family helped out.

This type of fence helps protect the garden against hard winds , even though the brushwood fence does allow some air to come through of course. This area is also protected by a stone wall, which makes this the warmest spot in my garden. Perfect for so many of the vegetables that I want to grow outdoors!

I can put basically anything on this pile now. Any weeds will dry out quickly in this warm and airy spot, and I can simply add any old brushwood on top. The material will shrink as time go by, and I'm counting on using this spot to grow vegetables too. I can put pots in there, or even grow plants straight in the material. One of my followers on Instagram suggested that I grow roses horizontally across the material. I can't wait to try it! But I will wait until I build my second fence somewhere else in my garden.

I think my brushwood fence looks lovely! What do you think?
/Sara Bäckmo